How to Negotiate Housing on a Counter Offer

When a seller or buyer comes at you with an offer for a piece of property, a counteroffer is a very important part of the negotiation process that can help get the price where you're comfortable. Find out about negotiating housing on a counter offer with help from an experienced real estate professional in this free video clip.

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Beth Gittleman, a Licensed Real Estate Professional. Now, we're going to talk about how to negotiate housing on a counter offer. So, it's very exciting, you found a property you want to purchase and the seller has given you a counter offer to, after you placed to purchase the property for. So, a counter offer is basically the owner telling you that they're so interested in you purchasing the property, they chose to not accept the original offer that you make. So, what you want to do is look at the counter offer and see what is really in there that you can negotiate with. So, if they came back to you at a price that is still something you can't afford or don't think is the full value of the property, make it more attractive to them. For instance, let's use an example. If the property is listed at $350,000 and you offered 330 and their counter offer said 340, they're trying to meet you halfway, what you want to do is still find a place that makes them happy and you happy. They obviously want to get closer to the 340, so maybe you offer to pay 337 and absorb some of their closing cost. You can explain to them that ultimately, you want to have the value of your home at a lesser price for the mortgage so that overtime, the interest and the principal is calculated on a different amount than that, than what they want. And that will probably make sense to them. But, if you are going to absorb you know, $2500 or $5000 of closing cost for them, that might be that extra cash in the banks that they need right now during this sales process. So, there's always something that you can make more attractive and when it makes sense, when it's common sense and it, it's presenting in that manner, usually through the help of your real estate professional, then you really can win the bid.